WOEBOT

As if to show what a complete bunch of lame twats all my fellow bloggers are (puts up fists to enormous throng of encircling 30-something males) I've noticed that since the demise of WOEBOT there have been absolutely no visual paeans to the glory of sleeve art when they WERE all the rage. A few in it's immediate aftermath, but thereafter silence. Pathetic! It's almost inspired me to move back to my old address and keep posting JPEGs in lieu of not having much interesting to say most of the time. Almost.

Picked up two absolutely stunning examples of wondrous sleeve art today. Firstly The Egg's "Civil Service", the close up of, er, an egg, which I was annoyed to not be able to find when I was undergoing my own wee prog odyssey. It's without a doubt the best "pure prog" record I've heard, minimal with rhythms not disorientatingly off-kilter, most usually quiet and tender (none of the on-off gradiosity which I recall Mark Fisher identified as the hallmark of prog). This will be on constant rotation.

Incidentally Mark has been progging it up this week. My first bone of contention (paleontogically speaking of course) with him would be that in spite of Tony Blair declaring himself to be a fan of King Crimson, his band "Ugly Rumours" were almost certainly anything but prog, akin to the pre-Dire Straits incarnation "Brewers Droop" I was saying. Pub-rock with flares. In fact if you had enough energy you could probably spin one of those fashionable forked-roads-of-reality skits which has Mark Knopfler as Prime Minister and Huey Lewis as President of the USA. I mean, for goodness sakes, how prog a name is "Ugly Rumours"? Even Mark Sinker agreed with me, though possibly that was a tactic to create disorder and unrest.

AGAIN k-punk on prog rock (!!!) with reference to Jeff Wayne's War Of The Worlds! Vis a vis prog EARTH to Mark *You're gonna have to lay off the lemurian stuff mate, we're clearly losing you in a haze of evolved symbolism* I bought that record at the time, aged 8 before I had hitched a ride on the express-train of musical hyperlinks, and was profoundly unsettled by it. "No Nathanial", in which the wife of a rector pleads to him not to commit suicide, is for me inextricably linked with (get your hankies out) the trauma of being sent away to boarding school. Burton sounded so crushingly world-weary, so "grown-up".

The other record I picked up today was Pulsallama's 7" on Y records "The Devil Lives In My Husbands Body", which, though it sounds like a Diamanda Galas record, is brilliantly tuneful, it's hilarious dialogue delivered by a B52s-alike Stepford wife. At the end the husband, who has been barking like a dog is sent to a psychoanalyst who concludes that he has Tourette's syndrome "He's going to be barking like that for the rest of his life" and the killer punchline (in a quavering terrified voice) "And our insurance doesn't cover it!" I was hipped to Pulsallama by Stuart Argabright (Hi mate!), and I guess this single with it's completely inspired graphic design, lifting dread from ACDC and Magma:

is in some fashion the mirror image of Vivienne Goldman's "Launderette" which was a London record issued on a New York label. The b-side "Ungawa Pt.II" is an excellent tribal punk stomp in the vein of The Slits and 23 Skidoo. And best of all Stacey "Timbalina" Elkin of the band has a website where you can download some of their tracks: http://www.redlipstick.net/pls.html

Posted by Woebot at September 4, 2004 08:47 AM